


Let The Memory Live Again

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Christmas, F/M, Friendship, Loss, Memory Loss, Post-Episode: 2015 Xmas The Husbands of River Song, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 18:10:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5550296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The TARDIS had always known the Doctor better than anyone - he had run away with her, after all, at the directions of a girl who looked achingly familiar. No wonder the time machine had taken it upon herself to cheer him up at Christmastime by offering the one present he didn't know he needed: reminding him who Clara Oswald once was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let The Memory Live Again

**Author's Note:**

> This idea came to me while watching The Husbands of River Song, when the Doctor told the TARDIS to stop trying to cheer him up - I liked the thought that the TARDIS was taking care of the Doctor after the events of Hell Bent and trying to keep him busy.
> 
> Set pre-, during and post-THoRS.

**“Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.” - Anne Rice, Blood & Gold.**

 

There was something very wrong with the TARDIS, the Doctor concluded. He wasn’t sure what, he wasn’t sure why, but he was certain that somewhere deep below the time rotor, there was a malfunction. It was the only way to explain the odd phenomena that he kept finding, semi-regularly, as he pottered around the twisting corridors and labyrinth of rooms.

He had thought he’d seen every room of the TARDIS in his nocturnal wanderings around the ship, from the library to the swimming pool, right the way down to the room that hummed in different keys depending on the style of shoes you were wearing, but he had recently chanced upon a room full of broken mechanical objects that he didn’t recall seeing before. He’d spent a happy month fixing each item with utmost precision, adding in occasional twists, like the toaster that now played “London’s Burning” if you tried to overdo your bread, but for the most part he’d kept it simple, thanking the TARDIS for her generous consideration of his interests. He’d looked for the room, concluding that she’d squirreled it away to add more complex oddities to fix, but try as he might, he’d never been able to locate it, and the TARDIS refused to yield to his polite requests – and then impolite requests – that she open it up again. _Strange,_ he mused as he stroked the console, apologising silently. _It was almost like she was disappointed with him, or like she was confused by his behaviour._

The room was not the only oddity. He’d come into the console room one morning to find the TARDIS had developed a new set of speakers overnight, and that she had chosen to play Elvis to him at maximum volume. _Jailhouse Rock_ blared in surround sound, and he’d frowned. “If I’d wanted Elvis, I could have just popped back to see him,” he’d chastised gently, and she’d beeped at him in a worried way. He wasn’t sure what she wanted, so he held up his hands and conceded defeat on the music front. It had been well intentioned, he was sure, but confusing nonetheless.

Following the Elvis incident, he’d idly picked up his guitar one evening to find it had acquired ten new strings since the last time he’d used it, back at the diner in Nevada. He raised his eyebrows in confusion. “Well that’s odd,” he murmured to himself. “Messing with my things? Is this becoming a habit now?” he asked the console sarcastically, patting it comfortingly to show he meant no harm. He strummed the sixteen strings with one hand and wondered absentmindedly if he could manage to play this, wandering off in search of the library and his guides to the guitar from 5168. The TARDIS beeped at him indignantly, but he was too absorbed in his dreams of rock stardom to notice.

It wasn’t as though the TARDIS’s interior antics were all he had to put up with. She’d decided abruptly that following directions wasn’t really her style and seemed to have developed a tendency to just materialise wherever and whenever she felt like, which apparently now seemed to entail a great deal of parties and very few planets to save. Not that he minded parties, of course, but he would honestly rather have faced a fleet of Daleks than try to make polite small talk any longer. When he voiced his concerns to her, she gave him a crashing starliner, a besieged Earth colony and a scientific base on Jupiter, but each time, he failed to feel the usual thrill of success when he saved the day. He’d never had this problem before. He lived for the thrill of danger and the rush of relief when he’d helped those in need. Without it, he felt oddly empty.

As he stumbled through the TARDIS doors, covered in snow, he realised abruptly that something had appeared on his head. It was a step too far for him, so he had entered the TARDIS’s telepathic interface in a state of fury, ready to demand answers to why she had chosen to misbehave in this way.

 _I’m trying to cheer you up,_ said a voice in his head, and he scowled a little. It was true he’d felt melancholic for weeks now, but he couldn’t remember precisely why. Something about a girl he had once known, and the things she had done, but he was sketchy on the details. He remembered a name, and a figure dancing around the TARDIS to terrible pop music, and a girl scattered across time, but that was all. He did _not_ need cheering up, thank you very much, because it wasn’t as though he could even remember her, so he wasn’t even sad, only he was, oh god he was falling apart, and he was trying to find a neat way to communicate all of this to the TARDIS when there was a knock at the door.

He yanked the door open and was confronted with a short, round man with an apologetic expression. “Is there anything on my head?” he demanded, and the man looked taken aback. 

“Er, well, yes…” he began nervously, taking on the look of a person who would rather be elsewhere. The Doctor scowled in displeasure.

“Describe it.”

“Well, you’ve sort of got antlers,” the figure mumbled, and the Doctor’s scowl only deepened, all thoughts of sadness gone from his mind.

“Antlers!” he all but shouted, turning back to the console. “You are a time-space machine! You’re a vehicle! I’ve never asked you to cheer me up with hologrammatic antlers! Thank you!” He knew she meant well, of course, but he didn’t need her to, didn’t need her pity or her silliness. He needed her to function so that he could get on with his life, all thoughts of Clara… Clara whatever-her-name-was gone from his mind. He did not need cheering up, and he did not need _bloody_ antlers. He crossed back to the door, determined to forget about her moods. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, are you the surgeon?”

“Close enough, why?”

 

~/~/~/~

 

He stumbled back into the TARDIS, trying not to think of what was coming for River. Trying not to think of that final meeting, and the library, and how his past self would be so oblivious to who she even was. He wanted nothing more than to fling himself, face down, onto his bed and consider his wife’s fate in private, but the TARDIS seemed to have other ideas. He’d pushed open the door and entered the room before he realised it was unfamiliar.

There was mahogany framed bed he dimly remembered acquiring in the Middle East, spread with a crimson bedspread he didn’t recognise. None of the furniture matched, but it was immaculately clean, the bottles and jars on the dresser neatly arranged by height, the books on the bookshelf stacked alphabetically, and the clothes – when he pulled open the wardrobe in curiosity – arranged by colour. A neat rainbow of shirts and dresses and lined up beneath it a row of heeled boots and trainers. A woman’s room. _Why is there a woman’s room in the TARDIS?_ He asked himself, and sighed, sinking onto the bed and picking up a book from the nightstand. _Pride & Prejudice. _An early copy, judging by the binding. He opened it curiously, wondering if a clue lay within.

 _For my love,_ read a note on the title page. _With all my affections, always. Jane._  

He closed the novel and laid it back down gently, and it was then that he noticed the red exercise book, stained with a solitary coffee cup ring and stamped with a school logo. Coal Hill School. He remembered it well. _It couldn’t hurt to make a little side stop,_ he told himself, so he wandered back to the console room, his mind turning over the strange room and who it had belonged to. The TARDIS seemed strangely content, almost smug, as he entered the coordinates, and he raised his eyebrows. “It’s just a school!’ he protested. “Nothing to be smug about! I don’t know why you’re being all funny with me, it’s _just a school for humans._ ”

He stepped outside, into the pervasive cool of an October day. The school gates were surrounded by wilting flowers and teddy bears, some with messages attached. He crouched to read a couple that hadn’t been victims of the autumn weather. 

_I miss you, Miss Oswald. I hope you and Mr Pink are happy wherever you are. – Courtney xx_

_You will be missed greatly, Clara. You were an excellent teacher and a wonderful friend. – Adrian_

His eye was drawn by something not of this world. An unnaturally large and curiously bright bloom, TARDIS blue, lay at the back, a notecard attached. He picked it up with trepidation and read the words, feeling a jolt of unreality as he recognised his own handwriting. _Clara,_ it read. _The impossible girl. Rest now._

He stumbled back into the TARDIS, still clutching the flower. She had died. How could he have forgotten something so pivotal? No wonder there had been that sadness, that sense of melancholy that invaded his life. His chest tightened as he thought of how he had let her down, how he had failed in his duty of care. He had lost another, and he couldn’t even bring to mind her face. No wonder the TARDIS had been trying to cheer him up. He rested his head on the console, tears filling his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled apologetically. “I didn’t realise…”

“Doctor!”

He pivoted abruptly and then cried out. There was a girl stood beside him at the console, and she appeared to be flying the TARDIS with a confident ease. She whooped in excitement, staring up at the time rotor, her eyes full of joy. “Did I actually just land this?  I told you I could, see?” She ran around the console and then disappeared, reappearing on the upper level, curled up in an armchair with a book in her hand. He ascended the stairs and crouched beside her, taking her in, from her hazel eyes to her dark hair and the way her mouth quirked upwards on one side as she smiled sleepily at her novel. She disappeared once more and appeared on the stairs, drinking coffee, tucking her hair behind her ears and checking her phone. She faded away as he got closer and he looked around for her, finding the console room empty and abruptly feeling the loss of her all over again, his hearts constricting painfully. 

“Doctor? Travelling with you made me feel really special. Thank you for that. Thank you for making me feel special.”

The recording was a little grainy, and overlaid with the sounds of a street, but for him it was enough. He sank down onto the steps, his head in his hands, allowing the tears to fall at last.

“Oh Clara,” he murmured softly to himself. “I’m sorry.”

The TARDIS beeped mournfully, and he understood now, understood her actions, understood what she had been trying to do.

“We can remember her together,” he whispered. “Together, or not at all.”


End file.
